When DBT Skills Don’t Come Easy
We’ve all had this day. You wake up, and just know that it’s going to be a struggle. Maybe you knocked a glass of water onto the floor while reaching for your alarm. Or, you overslept. Or, you couldn’t sleep at all or woke up early. Or, the phone (telemarketer) woke you up on the one day each week you can sleep in.
Maybe you have a reason for the way you feel, and maybe you don’t. It could be that you just woke up feeling in a funk, as if everyone on Earth must have better plans for the day that you do. So you check the facts. If you can find a good reason for the way you feel, and your emotions are justified, then you problem solve—you figure out how to take care of the thing looming over you that is making your day worse. If you can’t find a good reason—and this happens all the time—your emotions aren’t justified, and so you turn to opposite action. If you feel lonely, bored, and as if no one in the world is thinking about you, and you check the facts and know this can’t be true, then you get out into the world and make contact with people—or at least go to a coffee shop to hone your observe skills.
But either way, your feelings are valid because you feel them, and regardless of which path you choose after checking the facts, when you’re at that fork in the road, deciding whether to problem solve or do opposite action, it’s easy to get stuck, and to ruminate, sit in the emotion until it becomes a mood. And moods are kind of like quicksand. Since emotions are fleeting, the lifecycle of an emotion lasting no more than a couple minutes at most, the longer we keep them around by dwelling on them, the more likely they are to become moods. Once we’re in a mood, the more difficult it is for us to get out it.
So there you are at the fork in the road. You checked the facts and you know, while your emotions are valid (because you feel them), you also know they are not justified. You know that opposite action will help pull you through, but you just…can’t…get…moving.
Sound familiar?
What we like to do when we find ourselves at this fork in the road is to take a pause, non-judgmentally observe the conflict—the difficulty in moving forward on one or the other path—and then turn the mind toward trying one thing, even briefly, to see if we can capture enough momentum to get moving. Sometimes taking a deep breath at this juncture can be enough fuel to propel the mind into a choice. Try it. Right now. If we can do it, you can do it.
A big part of the struggle is that ruminating is just easier. It might not feel good, but it sure is familiar, and doesn’t require a lot of creativity or energy to stay in it. Yet, this is a myth, because the long-term drain on our energy as we ruminate on our emotions is, well, equivalent to trying to get out of quicksand.
